Employers: 'I can't find enough talent'

From information technology to manufacturing, companies are making themselves known on college campuses to shape the training their future employees are getting.

Alicia Poling(Photo: Provided)

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Companies say they need both technical expertise and soft skills, such as communication or teamwork.

More universities are requiring public speaking or other non-core courses.

Companies pay thousands of dollars to join centers at universities that target a particular industry.

COVINGTON – Alicia Poling of Burlington hadn't worked long at Clear Measures before she started responding to questions from her bosses about the servers and databases she was monitoring.

"My first day is when they made me start answering the phone," said Poling, a Clear Measures operations technician and a business informatics major who graduated from Northern Kentucky University in May. "I was completely terrified."

Poling's experience is one playing out across the region: Clear Measures and other growing companies all over Greater Cincinnati say getting trained workers from local colleges is their most urgent concern, despite dozens of public and private training programs.

"I can't find enough talent," said John Bostick, chairman and chief executive officer at Clear Measures, the data management company formed from a combination of dbaDirect and Lucrum. "If we don't get more talent in this area, companies are going to move elsewhere."

Accounting, data analytics and advanced manufacturing companies are among those found on college campuses these days, their managers hoping to ensure they get employees with the right mix of technical and communication skills.

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Lyle Fry drills a hole into a handlebar he is making during a mechanical engineering technology class at Cincinnati State. “Employers are calling me constantly looking for good people,” said Mike DeVore, program chairman.(Photo: The Enquirer/Gary Landers)

At UC, Clear Measures is one of the companies that has paid about $10,000 to join the Center for Business Analytics, giving them the chance not only to share best practices but to train and hire the interns, co-ops and full-time workers they need.

"What they're really telling us, particularly in analytics, is that they need people who are technically competent," said Dave Szymanski, dean of the UC's Lindner College of Business.

Matching students with college majors that lead to high-growth industries is a challenge. Ohio is spending $12 million on an Internet portal, OhioMeansJobs.com, to help students make those choices.

Szymanski said new areas like data visualization and econometrics are changing all the time. "It's always, 'What's next?' " he said.

"There are new routines, new programs, new ways of doing things. We want to be part of that knowledge creation."

Sometimes the link between universities and employers is nothing more than persistent phone calls. "Employers are calling me constantly looking for good people," said Mike DeVore, chairman of the Mechanical Engineering Technology program at Cincinnati State Technical & Community College.

"I think there's increasing pressure for companies to get highly trained people," DeVore added. "We used to contact them (employers). Now they contact us."

He's on program advisory boards at NKU, Miami and Xavier universities and the University of Cincinnati. He tells them graduates not only need accounting skills but the ability to make a presentation and to work in teams.

"They want to know what we want," Romp said. "A lot of schools here are arming these students. 'Yeah, you're going to need accounting, but you're going to need these other things, too.' "

Clear Measures gets 70 percent of its headquarters employees from regional universities, 20 percent from NKU alone. It's growing so fast, though, that it's got more than a dozen openings now. Locally, it employs about 130 people in its RiverCenter offices and hopes to add at least 30 more during the next three years.

Linking academic programs in colleges with real-time business needs feeds the growth at Clear Measures, Bostick said, particularly in database management and data analytics. That increases the pressure to find employees quickly to fill that demand.

John Bostick(Photo: Provided)

"Mountains of data are providing a huge regional opportunity here," he said. "Once I hook a business executive on using the data, if it's not available he's going to be upset."

He says databases affect everything from Girl Scout cookie sales to Reds tickets to supplies at a local sandwich shop.

Some Clear Measures executives teach at NKU, where the College of Informatics has been around for nearly a decade. The college has become one of NKU's best links to local employers.

"We've invested our time in a bet that we can get talent from that university," Bostick said.

One of those is Ava Gailliot of Northside, who graduated from NKU with a degree in computer information technology in December 2012 and started at Clear Measures as a system administrator, managing databases for clients.

NKU requires that some students take public speaking classes.

"I did feel very prepared," Gailliot said. "If you were looking for those types of positions, the training was there for you."